Sunday, January 25, 2009

Since a couple of people have asked for it, this post is a more detailed explanation of my current job - what the company does, what I do there, and what it's like working there.

In November 2008 I resigned as a software engineer at Micron Technology to take a position as a software engineer at Telemetric Corporation. Telemetric's business model is based around selling equipment and services to help utility companies wirelessly monitor equipment in power distribution networks. Because the company's products use the celluar network, they allow remote monitoring of substation equipment without the need for on-site personnel or physical communication lines. These products align the with the current smart grid initiatives, which are intended to make the power grid more fault tolerant, adaptable, and more easily managed.

Once a distribution system is equipped with Telemetric devices, a utility can manage intelligent electronic devices in their distribution network remotely. This means configuration changes can be initiated from the utility's control center rather than requiring a truck be sent out to a remote substation. A monitoring system called a SCADA System can be used to continuously monitor and control devices in the field over the wireless network. Alternately, Telemetric maintains a website for those customers who do not have a SCADA system so they too can monitor and control their devices in the field.

The engineering team has two main groups, a hardware group (which designs and builds the devices) and a smaller software team which maintains the software side (SCADA integration code and the web applications which allow remote monitoring and control). I'm in the software group; my main project to date have been writing software to automatically test the devices. I suspect that my future projects will include website enhancements and possibly also enhancements to the code used for SCADA integration.

So far, it has been a positive change for my career. The work has been interesting and Telemetric is a well-run profitable company with good people. With the economy being what it is, it's hard to feel too comfortable with any job but right now things seem to be as stable as they can be.

It's been pretty slow and they are slowing laying off the temp workers. There is a rumor they might get some more work sent to them from their Chicago office. At this point, it pretty much is "no news" though.